Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms
Description
Other Rooms, the first publication to comprehensively feature Jo Ann Callis' mid-1970s investigation of the nude body and sexuality, is a revelation; the work is provocative, seductive and remarkably fresh. The artist's playful, evocative use of constrictions and overlays on the human form, including twine, belts, tape and other everyday materials, are both humorous and fraught, offering an intensely personal assessment of the variable meanings of pleasure and the female nude as a staple of fine art photography. Callis has been an active artist since the 1960s, working in painting, sculpture and photography, among other media, and is known for capturing complex and often opposing emotions in a single piece. Jo Ann Callis: Other Rooms is an exquisitely produced artist's book containing Callis' photographs of the human form from her 1976-77 provisionally titled series Early Color, as well as a selection of black-and-white photographs from the same period. In this intimate volume, Callis photographs her models nude, frequently in close proximity, and in anonymous and mysterious settings, juxtaposing tactile props like honey, sand and fabric with skin. The photographs in this volume are at once beautiful and discomfiting, delicate and raw, mysterious and thoughtful, and confirm Callis' important place in the history of 1970s color photography.Product Details
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About the Author
Reviews
A student of Heinecken at UCLA, Callis offers a female counterpoint to his work: She teases us with sexuality through provocative poses, skin altered by lipstick and binding, relics of fetishes, and another's roving hands. - American Photo
Callis helped pioneer studio photography into its full, chromatic potential. She was among the first to blur interiors with interiority in a manner both uncanny and unutterable, like the moment a song shifts from major to minor key, or a scene from a dream in which you can't name the face, but you know exactly whom you are with. Her picture's aren't coquettish; there isn't any cheeckiness to her suggstions. There is only an odd arousal, an absolute command of the strange. - Dazed
The images present a bloodless eroticism, uncanny, simultaneously sexual and absented of desire. - American Suburbx
Callis' body of work doesn't just speak to hidden desires; it is also candid and almost unsettlingly sensuous in its fragmented treatment of the body, existing in a detached, dreamlike state of timelessness without definitive context. - Interview
Callis' lavishly saturated Cibachromes of cinematic, painstakingly composed tableaux of food, the body, and everyday objects play with surrealism and tease the subconscious, oftentimes set within the domestic space and dealing with tropes of femininity. - Interview
Her imagery feels deliciously voyeuristic, with many of her subjects' faces obscured, or just a ash of bound flesh in frame. Callis invites us to peer in on a private tableau, and praise the power of the body. - Flare
